Anatoly Kitov - Pioneer of Russian Informatics - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 85

It is necessary to mark out two pioneer initiatives of A.Kitov which had national
importance. In January 1959 A. Kitov sent a letter to the USSR leader Nikita Khru-
shchev "About creating automated management system for national economy" where
he proposed to create national computer network to be used for multiple purposes,
first of all to manage Soviet economy. Anatoly Ivanovich added his brochure "Digital
computing machines" (1958) to this letter.
The top leaders of the country partly supported Kitov's initiatives, and special gov-
ernment resolution was approved with the decision to produce modern computers and
use them in production automation. But main ideas of Kitov's letter regarding manag-
ing economy with the help of national computer network were not approved.
In November 1959 A. Kitov made the first in the USSR report on management in-
formation systems (MIS) for enterprises and industries. In autumn 1959 A. Kitov sent
the second letter to Nikita Khrushchev in which he suggested the way to minimize
expenses of creating national computer network. He added to this letter project in 200
pages (called Red Book) of creation unified automated administrative control system
to be used simultaneously for army and civil economy. It should be based on common
network of computer centers established and maintained by the Ministry of Defense.
Concentration of computers in powerful centers with reliable maintenance, run by
military personnel, would sufficiently raise quality of their usage.
The second Kitov's initiative had worse consequences than his previous letter. He
criticized the situation with using computers in the USSR, especially in the Soviet
Army, and it caused discontent and rage of high authorities. The project was rejected,
and A. Kitov was expelled from the Communist Party of the USSR, moved off his
administrative position and left the Soviet Army.
It was a severe blow. That could be certain end of any political and scientific career
for most of those who would, by a misplay of luck, find himself in similar situation
but not for A. Kitov. He was a man of ideas and real patriot of his country. Although
being forced to start again with another work, in the beginning of the 1960-s, he did
not quit the idea of global automatic control system. In 1961 he published one of his
main works in the field of management information systems - "Cybernetics and man-
agement of national economy". Kitov considered Soviet economy as a complex
cybernetical system which had to be optimized. To manage it efficiently it was neces-
sary to build distributed national network of computing centers which would work
with economic information. He suggested to join main computers into United central-
ized management information system for national economy. This article by was
highly appreciated by Soviet and foreign specialists, including specialists from the
USA. The big positive review on this article appeared in 1963 in the Operations
Research journal (Vol. 11, № 6, November-December).
In 1962 Kitov made a report called "Associative programming" in which stated the
main ideas of his theory of working with large information units. He authored and
introduced notion "associative programming", defining it as following. "Associative
programming is a totality of solution methods, intended for information logic prob-
lems, which are based on programming of associative relations between the data
stored in computer memory … In other countries this range of problems is also called:
list-processing, node-processing, chain-addressing, control words method, etc."
In the middle of 1960 th A. Kitov was appointed the Chief designer of the Industrial
management information system (MIS) of the Ministry for Radio Engineering